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Benin Bound

Benin Bound

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When we moved to Virginia, Suzanne was a six-month old baby. Today she flies to Benin, West Africa, to begin two-plus years of Peace Corps service. The room into which she’s crammed two decades worth of books and photos, dreams and plans — that room is preternaturally tidy now.

I made myself go in it late yesterday, though I would just as soon have left the door closed. But as she begins her adventure overseas, we begin the adventure of living without her.

It’s what you do as a parent and as a human being, learn to live without the ones you love.  This time the sadness has a fullness to it, though, a sense of life renewing itself. And that makes me grateful for it, in the same way that I’m glad for much-needed rain or the first crisp days of fall.

I don’t know where Suzanne will be stationed in this strange new country. Will it be in the south, near the water, or in the north, near the Sahel? More likely somewhere in the middle.

All I know is that the map of Benin that Suzanne studied for months is now in my possession. I’m the one studying its towns and rivers; I’m the one dreaming about the day when I can visit this faraway place.

 

A Change of Screen

A Change of Screen

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A change of scene is not always possible, so in its place, a change of screen. I choose a photo of a hike we took in the Czech Republic, high above the town of Czesky Krumlov. The Vltava River flows below, out of view in this photograph. And the hills that rise in blue infinity, those are the Sumava Mountains of Bohemia, in the heart of Europe.

When I stare at my computer’s desktop screen now, I remember the breathlessness of that walk, the little shrines we stopped at along the way, the snails that clung to the dew-wet grass, the view that awaited us at the top. Limitless. 

Sleight of Hand

Sleight of Hand

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A month from today Suzanne flies to Benin, West Africa, to begin her Peace Corps assignment. We’ve known about this for months, but now that we’re down to the final weeks it’s becoming more and more a reality. The map of Africa isn’t the only thing swinging into high relief these days. So is the map of parenthood, the map of life even, if that isn’t too melodramatic.

Children are supposed to leave their parents, start lives of their own. This is the natural order of things. I always believed this when I was the child, and I believed it as a parent, too — when my kids were young.  Now I’m having to put my money where my mouth is.

To stave off nervousness I’m concentrating not on how I’ll feel when Suzanne takes off and am trying to imagine how she’ll feel. It’s a parental sleight-of-hand that many of us do unconsciously all the time. It’s why we can smile through our tears.

I remember exactly the way I felt when I walked on the tarmac toward the plane that would fly me to Europe for two months backpacking with friends. I had just turned 20 and my whole life — and Europe! — were ahead of me. I felt like I was bouncing off the pavement. I was floating. That’s the feeling I’ll be trying to conjure up as Suzanne strides toward her future.

On Broadway

On Broadway

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The tune has been in my head the last few days. The tune is there because I was there. On Broadway, that is. Not the part George Benson sings about, not the place where “the neon lights are bright.” Not Times Square Broadway.

I’m talking Upper West Side Broadway. Corner grocers, vacuum cleaner stores, coffee shops. There was a time when I lived there that if I ran out of paper and had to run down to the tiny stationary store to buy some, I hesitated. I would have been on deadline then (I was always on deadline that year) and I knew I would run into at least a couple of people I knew on the way there and back. Could I afford the time to buy the paper and chat with the friends?

The answer, always, was yes.  I had lived there for a few months. And when I walked down Broadway I knew people. I didn’t need neon lights.

Saturday, during my 21-hour visit to Manhattan, I had time to walk from 114th to 77th Street. The sun was bright, the air was warm, the pedestrians were of every size, shape and color.  I didn’t know people to talk to along the way. But I had left one good friend at 113th Street and met another at 77th. My feet flew down the pavement. There was energy and street life. It was good to be back on Broadway.

A Walk in Ireland

A Walk in Ireland

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The walks we took in Ireland: along Grafton Street in Dublin, through the arch in Galway City, to the ends of the earth at the Cliffs of Moher.

The walk I remember most: An ordinary one in Donegal, fuchsia hanging along the hedgerows. The fuchsia surprised me. I thought of it as a hothouse plant, something to be coddled. But in Ireland it thrived on neglect — along with rain, mist and the soft Irish air.

This walk I remember with the fuchsia was down a small lane. The sun seemed never to set, and our summer would never end. This was a long time ago.

Google Travel

Google Travel

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Last night we had a full house, and before dinner we talked about the Occoquan Reservoir and the roads and bridges and houses around it. Claire’s boyfriend, Stevie, grew up a stone’s throw from the water. He fishes it all summer and knows ever cove and inlet. My brother Drew, who is moving back to Northern Virginia after almost two years in St. Louis, wouldn’t mind living in a house near the reservoir.

So commenced one of those delightful (modern) conversations that is part talk and part Google maps. We found the house, looked at the terrain around it, figured out how wide the creek would be that flows beside it. Then we looked at Facebook photos of fish Claire and Stevie have caught and released back into the lake, largemouth bass and catfish.

There are things we couldn’t have done a few years ago; so, in a way, we plumbed the place more. But, I also wonder, did I see just enough to make me less likely to see it — for real — for myself?

Photo: Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries

A Place Apart

A Place Apart

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I’ve been re-reading the memoirs of Niall Williams and Christine Breen, who in 1985 moved from Manhattan to Kiltumper, County Clare, Ireland to write, paint and live a simple life. Their first two summers were some of the rainiest on record and tested their resolve. But in 1987 the sun shone and the turf dried and the hay was made before the rains came again.

It was then that they wrote, “Days and nights in Kiltumper are perfect countryside settings for the quiet contemplation of a career, a love, a life. In this green isolation, whole chunks of life can suddenly seem unimportant. A walk across fields in the evening light can change philosophies forever.”

Like many writers they found that a change of scene created a change of heart. “Kiltumper had come to seem a sort of relief post, quite literally a place apart, a place to come to in which to draw breath and look outwards over the fields, to find the direction of your life.”

Reading this, losing myself in their fantasy, I wonder: Can I ever do the same thing by staying put in the suburbs? Can I walk my way into an epiphany? I must admit, when I’m reading about the west of Ireland, I think not.

Terra Incognita

Terra Incognita

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An element of modern life that we tend to discount is the amount of travel we undertake. I often think of this after one of my quick trips to Kentucky, a quick trip that takes eight hours each way.

But even the distance conquered by each suburban commuter, moving daily from one realm to another, can be 50 miles or more round trip.

Once, when Mom and I were traveling together in Ireland, we asked a shop woman for directions to a manor house that we knew was less than 10 miles away. She pointed us down a stretch of highway. “It’s lovely that way, I’ve heard,” she said.

It took us a minute to realize that the woman had never been there. What was for us a short jaunt, just one tiny leg of a many-legged adventure, was for her terra incognita.

And so it goes with traveling. We learn not just from the distances we traverse but from the people we meet along the way. People who show us another way to live, the way of staying put.
Staying put is our terra incognita.

A Walkway in the Sky

A Walkway in the Sky

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One of the world’s greatest walks is the pedestrian path of the Brooklyn Bridge. Stroll across it at sunset on a balmy late fall afternoon and see the city at its finest.

If you’re walking toward Brooklyn, on your right is South Street Seaport, lower Manhattan and, once you’re out far enough, the Statue of Liberty. On your left is midtown, with the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. Ahead of you is this view, the towers and cables of the bridge itself, built six times stronger than it needed to be, built for the ages, and now 127 years old. A bridge that has inspired poets and madmen and ordinary citizens who need to believe in beauty.

The Quiet Life

The Quiet Life

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On Saturday we toured Holmes County, Ohio, home to the world’s largest Amish population. We passed buggy after buggy, and after a while I noticed there were different models. Some were like sedans; others resembled little trucks. All were pulled by beautifully sleek black horses.

In the village of New Hope, Amish men with long white beards rode their bikes up to the hardware store. A few miles outside the village, past the small school, a woman named Lavina met us in her home and showed us the quilts she and her sister, Mary, had made. The quilts were piled on a double bed and she flipped each one over to reveal the varying patterns and colors of the one beneath.

A few miles away we bought stainless steel cookware at the Yoder Bargain store. A young girl with head scarf and long dress browsed the sewing notions. An Amish family looked over the baby clothes. We found an entire small room devoted to rubber stamps. The store was dark and quiet, and when we left to get in our car I glimpsed a fall tableaux: red-leaved trees, corn crib, white-hatted Amish grandmother tending the mums, a buggy in the distance. No electric wires or telephone lines in sight.

This is a quiet world, one without radio music, car horns or text message beeps. I couldn’t live in it, I certainly couldn’t blog in it, but I could enter as a visitor and savor the stillness.